1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to substantially isolating target plant tissues, such as embryos, which are suitable for genetic transformation or tissue culture.
2. Description of Related Art
The preparation of tissues for plant propagation, regeneration and transformation is time consuming and labor intensive, especially as it usually involves manual excision of transformable or culturable plant tissues. For example, in corn (Zea mays), individual immature embryos are typically removed manually to provide genetically-transformable explants. The manual excision of embryogenic tissues is laborious and risks ergonomic injury to the worker. Moreover, when larger amounts of transformable plant tissue are required for high-throughput transformation and plant production, more workers must be employed and trained to meet the increased demands. Additionally, there can be significant variability in the quality of plant tissues obtained, depending on the skill level, care, attentiveness, and fatigue of the individual workers.
The tissue variability and lack of amenability to automation in previous techniques for isolating transformable plant tissues is problematic, as poor quality tissues negatively impact subsequent tissue culture, genetic transformation, and plant propagation. Nonetheless, to produce even a single transgenic plant suitable for commercial development and use in agriculture, it may be necessary to produce tens of thousands of individual transformation events in a single species. Thus, there is a great need in the art for improved methods of preparing target plant tissues that are more efficient, reduce the overall ergonomic burden on workers, reduce the amount of labor needed to process the plant materials, and/or that yield plant tissues that are of higher and more consistent quality than manually produced tissues.